To Infinity and Beyond

From MOJO
55, June 1998, by Andy Gill

He bleeps. He whirs. He has been
reinventing the language of sound for over half the 50 years since he was
first switched on. Who better to probe his own workings than a fully
charged Brian Eno? Andy Gill reports.

These days, you have to catch Brian
Eno as and when you can. Always peripatetically inclined, he now spends
even more time abroad - partly, he explains, to escape the stultifying
sense of ossification which, despite the brief shaft of optimism last
May, still hangs like a dark cloud over Britain. Other countries, he
feels, seem to have a much more optimistic sense of the possibility of
meaningful change.

Most musicians lead international lives
purely by dint of touring obligations, but in the case of Eno - whose
last performing gig was probably his 1992 appearance at Sadler's Wells,
where he delivered a trio of illuminated lectures on the apparently
related subjects of perfume, defence, and David Bowies wedding -
the urge is more personal, and more likely to involve general artistic
projects than anythiny specifically musical. Last year, for instance, he
spent several months in St. Petersburg, soaking up the atmosphere and
exhibiting an installation in the Pavlovsk Palace, then darted off to a
few other countries.

Which is why I meet him, wrapped in a
1ong leather greatcoat and hunched over Nabokovs Essays On Russian
literature in the bar of Dublin's Clarence Hotel, on a brief stopover,
before he jets off to the South of France the next day. You must
hear this, he enthuses, reading aloud a passage in which the
circuitous elegance of a sentence by Gogol is reflected in the
equivalent elegance of Nabokov's commentary upon it. Not exactly the
kind of thing which excites most pop musicians, but then Eno isn't
exactly your run-of-the-mill musician. For despite having served as
midwife to some of the last few decades' more innovative and
biggest-selling records from U2 and Talking Heads, Eno's presence in the
music industry has always been as more of a marginal irritant, rather
like the tiny piece of grit which stimulates oysters to develop pearls.

His reputation as pop's resident
egghead, the "Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brian That Rules From The
Centre Of The Ultraworld, has been well earned, if occasionally
something of an annoyance. At times, it's seemed like he's operating as
an undercover agent, smuggling in ideas, approaches and sounds which
seem anathema at the time - ambient music being the most obvious example
- but which usually find acceptance several years later. In the
mid-'70s, he became a patron of the avant-garde when he persuaded Island
Records to fund his Obscure label, whose output included the
ground-breaking first releases by Michael Nyrnan, John Adams, David Toop
and The Penguin Cafe Orchestra, as well as the original (and best)
version of Gavin Bryars' Sinking Of The Titanic. Lack of commerciality,
in addition, has never determined which production commissions he
accepts and has been irrelevant to most of his own recorded output,
which, as Eno's 50th birthday approaches this May 15, is what concerns
us here.

Like his roving gaze, Eno's discourse is
always on the alert for new sensations, roaming across related topics
and tangents at will, but with a clarity and penetration that reflects
the depth of his interest. Unlike most musicians, he never seems
surprised by a question or a twist inthe conversation, as if
he's already considered all these matters long and hard beforehand and
has the footnotes to prove it. Eno once described himself as a "non-musician",
and he certainly thinks far too much to be a successful pop star, but
it's undeniable that without him tinkering away on its fringes, modern
music would be a far, far duller place.

Roxy Music (1972) Roxy
Music

Like many people's first records, the
first Roxy album was material that we had played and rehearsed so often
that going into the studio was a fairly straightforward business of just
putting it onto tape. I don't remember there being that much overdubbing
and fiddling around. We had rehearsed for a year and a half before we
even played a show - and that was at some guy's birthday party. We had
only played between half a dozen and 10 shows before we started
recording, and the only recording we'd done together before was a John
Peel session, which caused enough of a sensation for us to get a record
deal. We knew we didn't sound like everybody else, but we thought we
sounded like everybody else plus something. what we didn't realise was
that there were actually quite a few things missing from what everybody
else would have been doing! We weren't sophisticated enough to make it
sound more normal than that - we probably would have done, had we
realised.

For Your Pleasure
(1973) Roxy Music

It's the same with all second albums:
you make the first one, then if that's a success, you spend the next
year touring with it and never really get time to write more niate-rial.
A few things like For Your Pleasure and In Every Dream Home A Heartache
had been written, but they hadn't received anything like the attention
those on the first record had. Also, we - particularly me - had started
to become more aware of the studio as a place where you could do things
that you couldn't really imagine before you got there. So we
deliberately left more of the record to be made when we got to the
studio: we were prepared to go in there with much less firm ideas, which
of course became my style of working. I think when I left, two things
happened: firstly, the band had consolidated its identity and their
sound had accordingly moved more towards the centre. Secondly, without
me a lot of the weird noises left! In retrospect, I think it was the
righit decision for evervbody that I left when I did - the way Bryan was
writing, the transition they made suited his new style of song. Mother
Of Pearl, for instance, wouldn't have sounded as good with me on it.

Here Come The Warm Jets
(1974)

What I wanted to do was focus on this
new way of making music in the studio, so I started making my own
records, which in retrospect sound pretty weird as well. I saw the
studio as a place to study sound, invent sound, craft it in ways you
couldn't do with live instruments. The main thing on Needle In The
Camel's Eye, for instance, is Phil Manzancra playing a riff on rhythm
guitar; meanwhile, I'm banging his whammy-bar, beating it in rhythm. We
did three or four tracks of him and I doing exactly the same thing, so
you're getting four rippling guitars pulsing against one another. That
was one of the things I learnt about multitracking at the time: that
rather than add different instruments, it was much more interesting to
layer the same instrument several times, maybe changing the pitch
slightly - you can get some really amazing ringing sounds, and a lot of
the tracks on the first album were done that Way. The title Warm Jets
came from the guitar sound on the track of that name, which I described
on the track-sheet as "warm jet guitar", because it sounded
like a tuned jet. Then I had the pack of playing cards with the picture
of that woman in there, and they sort of connected. That was one of the
other things that was going on at the time: this idea that music was
still tied to some idea of revolution, and that one of the revolutions
was a sexual revolution. I wasn't making a big political point, I just
liked having fun with those things. Most people didn't realise for a
long time - it was rather deeply concealed!

No Pussyfooting (1973)
Evening Star (1974) Fripp & Eno

Fripp is one of my great collaborators,
a brilliant and totally original musician who worked on a lot of my
records, a well as the Bowie albums. On No Pussyfooting, Id
invented his long delay echo system which he played through, building up
these huge fugue-like pieces, dense carpets of sound. I've heard other
people trying to us that system, and they just don't have the musical
brains to do anything interesting with it - it's verv easy to just get
stuck in a kind of drone rut, but he was clever enough to know how to
shift out of one mode to another. On Evening Star, we did less
of the loop thing, and I played synthesizer; those were more like
compositions, really.

Taking Tiger Mountain (By
Strategy) (1974)

I was attracted to that idea of an art
that wasn't about I love you", which I thought was the
biggest limitation of most popular music. My response was just to ban
the first and second person singular from my songs. I thought, if You
write, songs without using those words, you're bound to end up somewhere
different! I wanted to make something that was like the voice of a group
of people who had done something together, or were about to do something
together. Then when I was in San Francisco's Chinatown, I bought a pack
of postcards called Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy, from the Chinese
opera of that name, and I thought, that's the kind of thing Id
like to write music about, that ide of inventing contemporary myths and
legends - because Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy is the almost
totally untrue, mythologised account of a Chinese military victory,
presented in heroic dance - fabulous Maoist propagandistic stuff.

I liked this first-person plural
approach because it de-focused the personality of the singer, which
fitted in well with my other project which was towards creating
landscapes rather than portraits. The way most songs were recorded then
was with the subject, the singer, in the centre, and everything arranged
around the singer, framing them, with occasionally backing vocalists
looking in to represent the voice of society. Since I'd got much more
interested in the background than the subject, one of the ways of
approaching it was to take the central figure out and replace it with
the backing singers. It was a way of switching conjugation, altering the
angle of the song. Ultimately, this led to a realisation that in many
ways, I was happier when the singer wasn't there at all, and neither
were the chorus!

June 1st 1974 (1974)
Kevin Ayers/John Cale/Eno/Nico

That was a live document, it wasn't
worked on in the studio. We did three or four concerts, and this was
recorded at the last of them, at the Rainbow. It was a good line-up,
because Robert Wyatt was part of it as well.

Another Green World
(1975)

Over the course of those first four
island albums, the relationship of background to foreground changed. If
you think of the singing being the foreground event, that was certainly
true on Warm Jets, a little less so on Taking Tiger Mountain,
much less so on Another Green World, and about half-and-half on
Before And After Science. I was getting more interested in
painting the picture, rather than the personality that stood in the
picture. On Another Green World, there are 14 pieces, of which
only five are songs, although most people think of it as a song record.
The title track became the theme for BBC2's Arena - £24.50
a week for 15 or so years.

Discreet Music (1975)

I was preparing for some live shows with
Fripp which incorporated films by Malcolm LeGrice, and I wanted to put
on tape some atmospheric backdrops for him to work against. I made a
tape for him and slowed it down to half speed, just to hear what it
sounded like, and I liked it so much that I left it as it was, and it
became Discreet Music. What I liked about it was the idea that,
by fading it in at the start and out at the end, you get the impression
that you've caught part of an endless process. That's always been a key
condition of ambient music for me, that it's something that is going on
anyway, which you enter and leave. Also, the idea of sounds being out of
earshot, so you can hear things near and far away and, you suspect,
there's stuff going on outside too. So you're hearing a partial
experience, in two senses.

Music For Films (1976,
1978)

I realised that what the studio was
really good for was making pictures, creating new landscapes and time
and space contexts. And because it was the only tool I had, I naturally
started to move more in that direction. Music For Films, like
Discreet Music, was an important record for me.

It was a limited edition at first, which
I had pressed up just to send to filmmakers, but my secret hope was that
people would listen to it and say, "Hey, this is a nice record",
which is what happened. I knew that to release a record like that in the
contemporary critical climate of English rock journalism, you'd just be
shot to bits, because it was so contrary to what was going on - these
little lost snippets of something or other, very unaggressive and
unattacking. One of them has been used about 25 times in different
programmes - it's about 30 seconds long, and it took me 30 seconds to
make.

Before And After Science
(1977)

Kurt's Rejoinder on Before And After
Science was the first time that I'd really used that vocal collage
technique, in this case of a Kurt Schwitters poem. It was another
experiment in how to have voices without the focus of the singer - how
to have all the value and tension and drama of language, and that kind
of meaning, without having the bloody singer holding the poxy microphone
and shaking his balls around. I thought you could do it by using people
who were self-evidently not singing, not part of the music. It was that,
of course, which then informed My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts.
The watercolour prints included with Before And After Science
were by Peter Schmidt - an attempt to see if we could parasitise the
record-distribution system to start selling prints, to introduce the
notion of going into a record shop and buying a suite of prints the same
way you would buy a suite of songs. Another brilliant idea that never
quite took off!

Cluster & Eno
(1977) Cluster & Eno

After The Heat (1978)
Eno/Moebius/Roedelius

I'd been interested in German music for
a long time, and met those guys in Hamburg, I think, where they invited
me to stay at their place and work with them for a while. A very nice
period - we worked as the mood took us, and came up with tons of stuff.
Then we recorded at Conny Plank's place, too  he was inspired, he
thought that the job of being an engineer was highly creative, so he was
very much a contributor to the things that came out of that studio.

Music for Airports (1978)

A lot of things like Music For
Airports came out of that Borgesian idea that you could invent a
world in reverse, by inventing the artefacts that ought to be in it
first: you think of what kind of music would be in that world, then you
make the music and the world forms itself around the music. This
American ensemble called Bang On A Can have done a live, musical
facsimile of Music For Airports, and what they've come up with
is so moving: because you know it's humans playing it, it's suddenly
invested with all this concentration and feeling that isn't really there
in the original. When I heard it, I actually had tears in my eyes, and I
couldnt understand why. Then a friend who saw it performed in New
York left a message saying it had moved him to tears; then I read a
review in The New York Times, which described it as "tear-jerking";
then Lou Reed and Lauric Anderson went to the New York show, and they
said it was heartbreaking! Everybody had the same response to this
music, which was originally conceived as deliberately austere and
unemotional.

Fourth World Vol. 1:
Possible Musics (1980) Jon Hassell/Brian Eno

Jon Hassell had a very specific agenda,
which was to make what he called "future primitive", or "Fourth
World" music; his other description of it was "a
coffee-coloured classical music". His idea was that the musical
cultures of the world were a huge resource that the snobbery of western
classical music had obscured and not taken seriously enough. He had
studied with Pandit Pranath, the Indian singer, and as a result was very
clear about the value and complexity of other musical traditions.

Ambient 2: The Plateaux of
Mirror (1980) Harold Budd/Brian Eno

The Pearl (1984) Harold
Budd/Brian Eno/Daniel Lanois

Harold Budd's intention was to make what
he called "eternally pretty music", and his way of composing
was to write a piece of music, then take out all the notes you didn't
like! It was essentially a kind of minimalism - he'd come up through the
California minimalist school, and had made a very hardcore minimalist
album before doing The Pavilion Of Dreams, which was quite a
classical record, for my Obscure label. So his trajectory was away from
what I call the standard NEA minimalism, that style of music guaranteed
to get you a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, because
it's totally respectable, modern, defensible and unobjectionable. Harold
moved from that to live improvisation on The Plateaux Of Mirror and The
Pearl: I would set up a sound, he would improvise to it, and
occasionally I would add something: but it was mainly him performing in
a sound-world I had created.

My Life In The Bush Of
Ghosts (1981) David Byrne/Brian Eno

I had this idea of music being a net
which traps things that happen to be passing through at the time; and at
the time of Bush Of Ghosts, I was living in New York and I was so
shocked by American radio because it was so opinionated with these
completely cranky, right-wing Klan members hosting their own radio
shows. I was amazed at how I could sit in my apartment and just listen
to all these ghosts in the air, all this madness that was America. I
started recording it, without any specific intention of using it on a
record. This was the beginning of sampling, and of the whole sampling
problem: it was only after we'd had the record pressed and sleeves made
that we learnt the estate of the radio evangelist Elizabeth Coulman
would not permit this tliing to be used "for a million dollars"
- not surprisingly, since it showed what an obnoxious creature she was.
So we had to junk all those albums. Then about eight months later, we
got a letter from the World Council of Islam saying they were going to
bring injunctions against this record, because one of the tracks used
some Algerian Muslims singing The Koran, and though it was not intended
in any way disrespectfully, it didn't matter, because The Koran is the
word of God and hence is itself a holy object. We had to promise that we
would remove it from future pressings, which we did.

Ambient 4: On Land (1982)

On Land was an attempt to create
something almost like a documentary film - each piece was an emotional
documentary of a place I had been, music as figurative as I could make
it. One of the big freedoms of music had been that it didn't have to
relate to anything  nobody listened to a piece of music and said, "What's
that supposed to be, then?, the way they would if they were
looking at an abstract painting; music was accepted as abstract. I
wanted to try and make music which attempted to be figurative, for
example by using lots of real noises. So on On Land, a lot of
the sounds don't come from instruments but stones, chains and wood, all
sorts of things which make the complex noises that real things make -
because most instruments make extremely focused noises. Classical music
is weighted very much towards purity and distinction from normal sounds
- what makes them musical is that you know they deliberately don't sound
like anything else in the world. What pop music keeps doing is shifting
the other way, absorbing more and more of the world. Rap is interesting
from that point of view, because it works with such chaotic bundles of
information, by sticking together samples that don't really fit, so you
get an effect of something like a real world noise - it's not organised
and exclusive, the way that classical sound is.

Apollo was done in relation to a
film which was made entirely of real footage from the Apollo missions.
When I was asked to do the music for the film, I discovered that the
astronauts were each allowed to take a cassette with them on those
missions, and they nearly all took country and western songs. I thought
it was a fabulous idea that people were out in space, playing this music
which really belongs to another frontier - in a way, seeing themselves
as cowboys. So the idea was to try and make a frontier space music of
some kind. The album did quite well when it came out, but the money it
earned is absolutely nothing compared to what the single song from it
that was used in Trainspotting has since earned.

Thursday Afternoon
(1985)

Thursday Afternoon and Neroli
are the purest expressions of what I thought ambient music should be:
endless, relatively unchanging moods. Both those pieces are as long as I
could fit on the record, basically. Thursday Afternoon was the
first CD-only release, because I wanted it to be that long. Just one of
the ways I've kept the sales limited - I wouldn't want to become
over-popular! There's not much to say about those things, other than
that they're very much studio-made.

This was an assembly of stuff by
different people, so it's very much an album, there's no unifying theme
or style.

Wrong Way Up (1990)
Cale & Eno

I thought Wrong Way Up was more
commercial than it actually turned out to be. It includes one of my
favourite songs of those written, Spinning Away, and others like Empty
Frame and The Man From Cordoba. Cale is sort of a genius - my image of
working with him is of him playing a part on the keyboard whilst talking
on the phone to somebody and reading a newspaper at the same time. And
he'll play great parts that way, too - music comes very easily to him,
and he has to take up the rest of his intelligence by doing other things
at the same time. It was nice, but very fractious at times - since we
didn't use an engineer, we didn't have anyone else to blame: it was just
two producers, two songwriters, two singers, both in the same room. Two
chiefs, and absolutely no indians!

Nerve Net (1992)

My Squelchy Life was a record I
finished for release in September 1991, but then Warner Brothers said
they couldn't release it 'til the following February. I hate it when
people do that, because if something's finished, it's timely for release
now. I said, "If it's going to come out in February it can't be
that same record." I was already starting to work on new things
that I wanted to be released the next year. So I withdrew it, perhaps
inadvisedly in retrospect, because some of the things on My Squelchy
Life I really like now. Some of them did get released eventually on
a box set: a song called Under, another called Over, and a third called
Some Words. Those three were left off Nerve Net, which became
less songy as a result, more instrumental.

The Shutov Assembly
(1992)

These were originally proposals for
orchestral pieces; what I wanted to do was make them, using my normal
tricks and devices, and then present them to an orchestra and ask them
to try and copy them accurately - so if this sound goes "dnnngeeeee",
you might need to have a damped tubular bell and a violin player working
together to make that one sound. I thought it would be an interesting
way to use an orchestra, to force it to use its instruments in a
different way. Bang On A Can have done that with Music For Airports.

Neroli (1993)

Neroli is just a single keyboard piece,
played with a sound I made very carefully. At that time I was interested
in Greek modes - the Lydian, Mixolydian, Dorian, Hypodorian - and I
wondered what would happen if you built an instrument (a synthesizer, in
this case) which observed only the harmonics which fitinto the
mode you intended to play in, so each note was a sort of baby
recapitulation of the whole piece. I played a Moorish sort of melody
about two minutes long into a primitive sequencer, a Yamaha Y7, then
split the keyboard into four or five regions, and got the sequencer to
play back the top part which would correspond to the top notes of the
right-hand - at normal tempo, over and over again, and the lower parts
at incrementally slower tempi, each looping individually. It starts out
in its individual form, as I played it, then the parts slip apart, like
tectonic plates. I like that place where systems and humans meet,
because what's the point of systems music in the age of the sequencer?
There's something weirdly amiss in doing things that machines can do
much better. But that's never been my intention - I've always been more
interested in what happens when we and our systems collide, when our
tastes and frailties and passions and mistakes meet up with systems that
are supposed to iron them out.

Spinner (1995) Eno &
Jah Wobble

Spinner wasn't really a
collaboration. I had done the soundtrack to the Derek Jarman film, Glitterbug,
but didn't think it stood up on its own as an album, without the film.
Somebody suggested I let Jah Wobble have a go at it, I presented him
with my original stereo mix, which he worked on top of . Some of the
tracks he left alone, others he added to - rhythms, bass parts, and some
orchestrations. So some pieces started out as landscapes, but ended up
completely rhythmic.

Original Soundtracks Vol 1:
Passengers (1995) Eno/PavarottiU2/Howie B

Several of those pieces started with
things begun in my studio in Kilburn. Part of the impulse was U2 wanting
to touch on things which they didn't think they could do within the
container 'U2' - their fans are often young people for whom the cost of
a CD is a serious thing, and they would feel really bad if people felt
they'd been deceived. They were also interested in the idea of
impressionistic rather than song-led music.

The Drop (1997)

That was my computer record, a lot of it
was made with sequencers. I was trying to re-think melody in a certain
way. There had been a lot of music in the last five years that
capitalised on things that sequencers do well making beats and grooves,
repeating cycles - and very little in relation to solving the other
problems, like constructing interesting new melodies. I described it as
what would happen if you tried to explain the sound of jazz to someone
who'd never heard it, who wasn't very clever, and your description
wasn't very good.